Small Intro

Andrew Hutchings (aka LinuxJedi) has worked on many of the Open Source software projects that make up the Internet. He now works from home in the UK for MariaDB developing their MariaDB ColumnStore engine.

All views / opinions on this blog are his own and not necessarily those of his employer or anyone else.

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Several years ago there was a fork of the unreleased MySQL 6.0 called Drizzle. It was designed to be a lightweight, cloud/web/UTF8 first database server with a microkernel style core. I worked for a while as one of the core developers of Drizzle until the corporate sponsor I worked for ceased funding its development.

My day job requires me to spend a lot of time in Linux terminals, hammering away at MariaDB ColumnStore to write and test new code as well as finding and fixing bugs. I have decided to write about the tools I use to get the job done, especially newer ones I have discovered.

My team and I are working on finalizing the feature set for MariaDB ColumnStore 1.1 right now and I wanted to take a bit of time to talk about one of the features I created for ColumnStore 1.1: BLOB/TEXT support.

There has been a lot of talk in the Open Source world about universal package formats. Specifically the big two, Flatpak and Snap packages. My current Linux desktop distro of choice, Solus, has recently announced support for them. Now, this has a lot of pros and cons and whilst I have seen and heard a lot of the positive points I want to put across what is probably my more unpopular point of view.